Public safety event-related communications are typically comprised of multiple intents of communications media. For example, one such intent of event-related communications media may be ‘subject matter media.’ Subject matter media is any modality of media which captures a portion of an event. Subject matter media is typically consumed by public safety personnel in an on-demand fashion. That is, some media may be watched or read by a public safety officer at a time that is convenient to the officer, as opposed to watching or reading the media live, that is, at the time the media is captured. For example, a public safety officer may review surveillance video, camera-captured images, documents, and public safety bulletins, for example, a BOLO (Be on the Lookout′) bulletin, long after the media is captured or made available. Another intent of event-related communications media may be ‘discussion media.’ Discussion media is any modality of media which is used to discuss subject matter media. Discussion media, by its very nature, is consumed by public safety personnel in real time. For example, a public safety officer may participate in a Push-to-Talk group call, instant messaging, or a telephone call in real time to discuss certain subject matter media during incident response.
Generally, public safety agencies log or record all intents and modalities of event-related communications media. When the media is subsequently retrieved by a public safety practitioner for incident review, the media is displayed time-wise in a purely linear fashion, where media is arranged according to its time of capture. As noted, discussion media is often used to discuss on-demand subject matter media that was captured at a previous time. If logged media is presented linearly strictly according to time of capture, it becomes impossible to associate discussion media with the relevant subject matter media under discussion.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. It will further be appreciated that certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. Those skilled in the art will further recognize that references to specific implementation embodiments such as “circuitry” may equally be accomplished via replacement with software instruction executions either on general purpose computing apparatus (e.g., CPU) or specialized processing apparatus (e.g., DSP). It will also be understood that the terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary technical meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions by persons skilled in the technical field as set forth above except where different specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein.